Elizabeth Bankowski wasn’t surprised Monday when Gov. Peter Shumlin announced he won’t seek re-election in 2016.
The longtime political operative, who headed Shumlin’s transition team upon his winning office in 2010, witnessed the same scenario 25 years ago.
Open to the first page of former Gov. Madeleine Kunin’s memoir “Living A Political Life,” and you can read how Bankowski, former chief of staff and campaign manager to the state’s first female governor, was there in 1990 when her boss revealed her own intentions to step down.
“I knew what I had to say,” Kunin recalls in her book, “but I simply did not know if I could say it.”
Kunin and Shumlin entered their respective news conferences as three-term leaders with big, innovative agendas.
“They faced a similar dilemma — could they move complex issues through a short two-year election cycle while holding on to public support?” Bankowski posited Monday. “When you try to be bold, you pay a price. It’s a steady erosion of support day, by day, by day.”
Kunin and Shumlin confided their decisions to only a few confidants before telling their staffs and summoning reporters to the Statehouse. The major difference between then and now: Kunin went public April 3, 1990 — seven months before the general election. Shumlin, by comparison, extended a full 18 months notice.
“Everyone tries to give people the time they’re going to need to put together a campaign,” Bankowski said. “And today, it seems the political season never really ends.”
Shumlin also may have learned a lesson from the late Gov. Richard Snelling, who reported the fact he wouldn’t seek re-election as a footnote to his January 1984 State of the State address.
“I remember vividly,” then Secretary of State James Douglas went on to tell Associated Press reporter Christopher Graff. “He said, ‘This is the last time I will address you under these circumstances,’ and we all thought he was talking about the economic downturn, but he had just told us he wasn’t running again.”
Douglas himself won election as governor in 2002 and served four terms before announcing the end of his political career Aug. 27, 2009.
“My staff and I discussed the potential effects of my decision on the upcoming legislative session,” Douglas recalls in his memoir, “The Vermont Way.” “Might I become a ‘lame duck,’ whereby the legislative majority would pay even less attention to me than before? Or, having erased the prospect of another campaign, might it be forced to assume a more cordial demeanor and cooperative attitude, since their favorite target will have disappeared?”
Shumlin may relate, said Bankowski, who received a call from him Monday.
“I sensed in his voice he sounded happy and light. The political season already is so much upon us — it’s the age we live in. This allows him to focus on the things he wants to get done and not have everything overlaid with, ‘What does this or that signal?’”
Kevin O’Connor, a former staffer of the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, is a Brattleboro-based writer. Email: kevinoconnorvt@gmail.com
